Read an excerpt from Seb Olma’s new book on the great digital swindle
Digital Taylorism: Labour Between Passion & Serendipity Attack of the Big Yawn In his fascinating historical study of the rise of happiness to the highly valued commodity it has become in our time, the British sociologist William Davies offers a brief yet
“We live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do”—Tristam Vivian Adams on Westworld
Sci-fi has a pedigree of exploring contemporary issues through the engaging gauze of societies and contexts far removed from painful familiarity. Inequality is explicated through different life forms, nuclear anxiety masquerades as fears of interstellar warfare, loneliness through the guise
A lot of libido, but no women — Eli Davies reviews Supersonic, the new Oasis documentary
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of bombast in the new Oasis documentary Supersonic. Everybody’s busy going mad for it and making history and being the biggest and the best. In a lot of the interview footage there’s a kind of coked-up
Buffoonery and erotic fascism — the meaning of Donald Trump
Buffoonery is almost an extended phenotype of dictators, and in times and places in which seriousness, judiciousness, and integrity reign, the buffoon assumes his rightful place near the bottom of the social order, ranting on street corners or sending out
Cruel optimism of the will in Bay Area punk production
This is an edited extract from Johanna Issacsson's The Ballerina and the Bull: Anarchist Utopias in the Age of Finance (out now). By 1986 punk was not just a battle cry, it was a scene that required institutions like show spaces and
Regulating capitalism in Marvel’s Civil War
Guest post by John Medhurst The central concern of modern politics is the extent to which the destructive, anti-social effects of neoliberal capitalism – most obviously those produced by the financial sector and fossil fuel industry – should be subject to
The camouflage of conspicuity — Tristam Vivian Adams on psychopathy and sociopathy
Psychopathy and sociopathy In my forthcoming book, The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy (forthcoming from Repeater), I make a distinction between psychopathy and sociopathy. The two terms are commonly used in an interchangeable way, as if they are one and
In a stink about a pink St George Cross
Professional controversialist Toby Young has got himself all in a froth about a pink St George Cross at England’s international this week Oh dear. Toby Young is all in a lather, a victim once more of the ‘PC brigade’. Writing in the
Siouxzi Connor on forests, childhood and Susan Sontag
Repeater: What struck you about Susan Sontag’s diaries? Siouxzi Connor: I felt like an invader reading these things but at the same time couldn’t pull myself away. I guess, in her personal life, the fact that she went through such a
A neo-Isherwood – David Stubbs on Bowie, Englishness and masculinity
Guest post by David Stubbs. His next book, 1996 and the End of History, will be published by Repeater in 2016. The first time I didn’t meet David Bowie was at a junior school village hall disco at Barwick-in-Elmet, the small